Repository | Book | Chapter

In this paper I wish to examine a contemporary response to an important debate in the "science" of hermeneutics—"the art of rightly understanding the speech, chiefly in written form, of another."¹ The 20th century has witnessed what elsewhere has been termed "a profound radicalization of the understanding of texts" inasmuch as hermeneutics—the programmatic of interpretation and all that it had hitherto supposed about the nature and relation of text and its meaning—is itself problematized. The site of the contestation has been language, understood in the broadest possible sense of the medium that functions to convey meaning, textual and otherwise. A variety of responses, maturing into formidable intellectual movements, have emerged, and continue to be articulated, especially in philosophy, literary studies and the social sciences. As is well-known, this virtual explosion of theories of textual meaning and vastly differing models of linguistic understanding, or of the semiological processes, during the intellectual ferment known as Modernism, has had considerable impact in areas as far afield as architecture, the arts, postmodernism, feminist studies, psychoanalysis, cross-cultural and post-colonial discourses, indigenist jurisprudence and even on geography and ecology or the geo-sciences. I will here confine my inquiry to a significant thinker rather than cover any particular movement or movements. I have chosen to discuss Paul Ricoeur's intervention in the debate between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Juergen Habermas concerning the proper task or calling, as it were, of hermeneutics as a mode of philosophical interrogation in the late 20th century. I will also take the opportunity of drawing some implications through this encounter with Hermes (the messenger of the gods) matured into hermeneuein, for thinking on religion (as distinct from the God of theology).

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-2824-3_7

Full citation: